Celebrating Childhood and Denouncing Neoliberalism

It was a slow WNBA news weekend/early morning...and then Lauren Jackson got signed.

Congrats Storm fans. Good luck to you Mercury.

So anyway, my mind was wandering this morning and started thinking of a potential post for tomorrow...at which point Tevin Campbell and Quincy Jones' song Tomorrow came to mind.


If you don't like this song, you might not like music, childhood, or humanity.

I was an 80's/90's child and my parents were Motown youth, so somehow this song was sort of like a bridge between the two generations that we could both get into.

So as I was reminiscing on childhood, I somehow started thinking how ultimately basketball is just a game. A game that many of us came to in childhood. It's about play, imagination, and celebration. A shame when it becomes about money, celebrity, and the media.

Then later on as I was walking around campus between meetings someone handed me a flier from one of those student groups dedicated to "putting Nike on notice" for their violations on campus (not sure what they are...and I can't make their meetings to get anymore information).

Which made me wonder about the proposal for WNBA corporate sponsorship:

Are there corporations that you would think the WNBA should reject for political reasons?

Or is all financial support equal regardless of the source?

Are there certain partnerships that would undermine the WNBA's claim that they are claiming to empower women, given that many of the labor practices of big corporations disproportionately harm women, particularly minority women, in the process of harming children?

I know it's wrong and devious to make this about the children and childhood -- everybody does that, whether conservative or liberal. Some of these corporate interests directly harm children by destroying families and communities and forcing children into the workforce at the expense of education. And if childhood isn't beautiful and worth protecting, I'm not sure what is.

Related Articles:

The WNBA & Corporate Marketing (here I advocated for linking with corporations...for the little catchy jingles they create)
http://rethinkbball.blogspot.com/2008/06/sometimes-i-dream-wnba-corporate.html

New Sports Marketing Partnership Comments On Future
http://www.cnbc.com/id/30563062